In a major speech this week on the economy, President Obama
emphasized that while the United States has recovered substantial ground
since the crisis of 2008-2009, wide swaths of the middle class still
confront a challenging environment. Above all, the past years have
eroded the 20th century dream of hard work translating into a better life.

As Obama explained,
it used to be that "a growing middle class was the engine of our
prosperity. Whether you owned a company, or swept its floors, or worked
anywhere in between, this country offered you a basic bargain -- a sense
that your hard work would be rewarded with fair wages and decent
benefits, the chance to buy a home, to save for retirement, and most of
all, a chance to hand down a better life for your kids. But over time,
that engine began to stall." What we are left with today is increased
inequality, in wages and in opportunity.

The assumption is that this is unequivocally a bad thing. There have
been countless stories about the "death of the American dream," and Detroit's bankruptcy last week
was taken as one more proof. Yet lately the unquestioned assumption of a
better future based on hard work has not served America well. If
anything, today's version of that dream has been the source of
complacency rather than strength, and its passing may be necessary in
order to pave the way for a constructive future.

But you wouldn't know that from the president's speech and from
continued news stories and academic studies. The inequalities of
opportunity were underscored by a recent study that was brought to
national attention by the New York Times
this week that showed wide variations in income mobility depending on
what part of the United States you live in. Those who live in
metropolitan areas, as well as those with more higher education and
wealthier parents, have significantly more upward mobility than many in
rural areas.

The wage stagnation for tens of millions of working Americans over
the past decades combined with the financial crisis has been painful and
even calamitous for millions. In truth, however, the middle class
security that has now disappeared only existed for a very brief period
after World War Two, when the United States accounted for half of global
industrial output and achieved a level of relative prosperity and
growth that was substantially higher than in any other country. Before
the Great Depression and World War Two, there was no assumption in the
17th, 18th or 19th centuries that the future would be inherently better for one's children.

As for income inequality, that is hardly a new issue. The presence of
inequality in the past did not impede economic growth. After the
American Revolution, income inequality began rising sharply along with
economic growth. And it continued to rise well into the early 20th century, when more people became rich and even more people became mired in a level of poverty that does not exist today.
Inequality then wasn't a barrier to mobility. If anything, it might
have been a spur. Seeing how the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age lived
provoked both the reforms of the Progressive Era and the ambitions of
millions of immigrants and citizens who wanted a better life and saw
that one was possible

Before the mid-20th century, the American dream was that
if you worked hard you had the potential to craft a good life. You could
be free from repressive government, and you could be able to watch your
children do better via education and their own hard work. That
potential was absent in other societies, and its presence -- along with
tens of millions of acres of unclaimed land -- was what drew so many
millions of immigrants.

In short, the equation of American economic success until the mid-20th century was not that if you worked hard you would have a stable material life. It was that if you worked hard, you could
create such a life. The difference is not semantic; it is fundamental,
and for Obama and many, many others, it has become blurred. The equation
articulated by Obama and likely shared by a significant majority of
Americans is that if you work hard, you should receive economic security
and see the same for your children. The flip side of that theory is
that if you don't gain economic security, something is wrong with the
system, and government has a responsibility to provide when that system
fails.

The belief that something is a given simply by birthright is never a
formula for long-term strength. Yet at some point in the last half of
the 20th century, the American dream morphed from the promise that you could realize a comfortable life, to a promise that being American meant you would and should realize that. Hence the feeling, held by so many, that promises have been betrayed and the system is broken.

In truth, the passing of that false certainty is a positive. Urgency
and uncertainty are not negatives, at least not inherently. They can
provide the necessary fuel for ambition and for creativity and work.
Urgency and uncertainty were the norm in the late 19th
century and look what those produced in America: the very power and
prosperity that catapulted the country to the center of the globe.

The United States, like many affluent nations, has reached a juncture
where the model that succeeded is not likely to be the model that will
succeed going forward. 19th century agricultural societies gave way to 20th century industrial ones, and 20th century industrial ones are giving way to 21st
century service and idea economies. None of that happened without
significant pain and disruption. Nor is our transition today without
substantial pain for many.

Government can and should be active in providing basic security for
those disrupted by these changes. But the contract that has now been
broken did not actually serve America well. It served the post-war
generation and their children, but it does not serve a United States now
embedded in a world where other societies are providing the same
potential that the United States did two centuries ago when that was
extremely rare.

What's needed is a sense the United States is a place where dreams
can be made manifest, not that it is a place where everyone will be safe
and secure. America remains a place where hard work and ambition and
creativity can translate into a good life. It is not a place where hard
work and ambition are guaranteed to yield results. And if we want a
vibrant, pulsing society in the 21st century, the passing of
that version of the American dream is not something to be mourned. We've
reached the end of complacency, and not a moment too soon.

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The greatest threats to free speech in America come from the state, not from activists on college campuses.

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A growing body of research debunks the idea that school quality is the main determinant of economic mobility.

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One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

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What the Trump administration has been threatening is not a “preemptive strike.”

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More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

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